Question

not sure why this isn’t working.
error I’m getting: ord() expected a character, but string of length 0 found

code:

phrase =  'test'
number = 0
text = 0
random1 = ''

while (number <= len(phrase)):

    letter = phrase[number:number+1]

    text = ord(letter) - ord('a')
    ....
    number = number + 1

if a print letter, i get the t for the first iteration

thanks,

Answer 1

You are failing on your last iteration. Because you let number take the value len(phrase), you are trying to slice your string beyond the end.

For example:

>>> "abc"[3:4]
''

String indices range from 0 to len(s)-1.

BTW: Python gives you much nicer ways to iterate over strings:

phrase = 'test'
for letter in phrase:
    text = ord(letter) - ord('a')
    ....